Can Saudis deflect the winds of change?

When protesters took to the streets last March, demanding political reforms, the rulers of Saudi Arabia were shocked.

It appeared the upheavals that have rocked much of the Arab world in recent months might spread to the Kingdom as well.

King Abdullah was moved to take an unprecedented step, in an effort to calm the unrest: He scheduled long-delayed municipal elections. Voter registration began on April 23 and Saudis will go to the polls on Sept. 29.

Make that Saudi men will go to the polls.

Women will still not be allowed to vote or run for office, but the newly created electoral commission says that’s only because there has not been enough time to make the necessary arrangements in all corners of the conservative Islamic state.

“There is nothing to stop the participation of the woman but this needs some preparations and we cannot make these preparations in all regions of the kingdom,” the commission said.

In Saudi Arabia, women cannot appear in public unless they are escorted by a male family member. They are not allowed to drive.

There is no elected governing body, such as a parliament, in Saudi Arabia, and political parties are forbidden.

The local municipal councils have little power and are filled mostly with royal family appointees.

In a further effort to dilute the restiveness of his subjects, the king also announced a huge economic package, said to be worth the equivalent of $100 billion, to fight chronic unemployment, housing shortages and corruption.

Elsewhere in the region, the United Arab Emirates is offering its politically dissatisfied a lukewarm sop of democracy. UAE voters will go to the polls on Sept. 24, but their only choices will be candidates handpicked by their rulers.

Bahrain, risking a serious backfire, is taking a harder line, holding a Sept. 24 election to replace 18 parliamentarians who are protesting the government’s crackdown on pro-democracy activities.

The move is reactionary but is not seen as responsive to the disturbances there last February, and the vote may be widely boycotted.

The Saudi monarchy has long realized how tenuous its grip on power really is, and actually took a stab at elections in 2005, allowing half of the council seats to be filled by local candidates.

The experiment with small-D democracy faltered, and further elections were delayed for years. The vote this month falls well short of activists’ demands for creation of a constitutional monarchy, to replace the absolute rule of the house of Saud.

The movement, however slight, toward democracy is good news, but it was, to coin a phrase, the least the king could do.

It remains to be seen if the reforms, such as they are, will be enough to stave off the sort of popular unrest, instability and outright rebellion that has lately swept over the autocratic regimes of Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Libya and other Gulf states.